Doing the Multimon

This site may earn affiliate commissions from the links on this page. Terms of use.

Most PC users today still use a single monitor, despite the fact that the majority of graphics cards at all price points have supported two displays for several years now. Many users also have an extra monitor lying around, perhaps left over from the last system upgrade. Unlike the innards of your PC, monitor technology doesn’t advance at quite the breathless rate that CPUs, memory, or graphics hardware does . Sure, LCD flat panels are all the rage  but if you buy one, does that mean you should throw away your old CRT?

Nope. If you have the space on your desk or work area, consider adding the old display to your system, not replacing it with a newer one. You can increase your desktop real estate by 50  100% or more. Once you do, you may find that you never go back. You’ll not only get hooked on the convenience of dual displays, but also on the added productivity.

This is particularly true if you use applications with separate windows for palettes or other program functionality. Photoshop is a great example of this. Plop all your menus, palettes and browser windows on one display, then maximize the work space in the main display. You can do more, faster in this way.

We’ll take a look at dual display options and how to set up two monitors with Windows XP, but the general concepts apply to Linux as well. Along the way, we’ll look at the different ways Nvidia and ATI handle dual displays. Quite a few graphics cards give you the option of attaching a TV, typically through an S-Video port, but we’re not going to cover that in this feature.

This site may earn affiliate commissions from the links on this page. Terms of use.

ExtremeTech Newsletter

Subscribe Today to get the latest ExtremeTech news delivered right to your inbox.

Email

This newsletter may contain advertising, deals, or affiliate links. Subscribing to a newsletter indicates your consent to our
Terms of Use and
Privacy Policy. You may unsubscribe from the newsletter at any time.